[lltx] Font names database

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 06:58:50PM +0100, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> Khaled Hosny a écrit :
> > I've considered using fontconfig (actually my first version were using
> > fc-list to list all system font files), but I disregarded it later as we
> > can't guarantee fontconfig (or fontconfig tools) are present on all
> > systems, also fontconfig tries to do smart things that wouldn't fit our
> > needs and we better off parsing font files ourselves.
> 
> Can't we assume fontconfig to be present wherever XeTeX is? But we may want to
> be more portable that XeTeX indeed.

Do TeXlive (or other TeX distributions) ship fontconfig's command line
tools? I think they are only shipping the library and we can't use the
library directly, unless someone writes luafontconfig binding and make
it work with LuaTeX. So we can only expect fontconfig on modern
GNU/Linux systems, not even sure about *BSD.

> Just out of curiosity, which kind of "smart" things is fc trying to do?

I don't know :) If I'd known, I wouldn't started this discussion at all,
even XeTeX does font parsing on its own (for SFNT fonts at least). I
also find the output of fc tools cryptic and inconsistent, but it may be
just me.
 
Regards,
 Khaled


-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer